The point I reached in my earlier post is that, with current techniques, we will be unable to determine whether LLMs are conscious. It is not a helpful question. That’s because questions of consciousness come down to whether an entity experiences qualia. We cannot determine whether entities experience qualia, except through their verbal/non-verbal communication of it. I did not provide an example of an LLM experiencing qualia.
I find myself regularly asking myself, “are LLMs conscious?” I have concluded that this question is unanswerable. To think about it, consciousness must first be defined, and then it must be possible to relate it between different entities. If that is impossible then some method of extrapolating must be found.
Defining Consciousness
Consciousness is not well-defined. There are definitions, of course, but none lend themselves to determining whether something is or is not conscious.